I wear his name like a scar.
Alessandro Rossi stole everything from me; my freedom, my future, the lie I told my father to keep him alive. He thinks I'm a tool to be used, a bride to be displayed, a Fraga to be broken. He thinks the ring on my finge...
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The silence that followed our argument was a living thing, filling the vast bedroom more completely than either of us ever could.
He'd given me the truth, the one I'd agreed to but had somehow, foolishly, begun to forget. He'd wielded it like a blade, and it had cut with a precision Liam's brutality never could.
"It was a business arrangement."
The words echoed in the emptiness, in the space between us where something else had almost begun to grow. I'd been a fool. A romantic, starry-eyed fool dressing a prison of my own making in delusions of connection. The man who took a bullet for me wasn't a hero protecting someone he cared for. He was a strategist protecting a vital asset. The bed we'd shared in the hospital wasn't a moment of intimacy, it was a practicality, a plan meant to break my walls.
I traced the fading bruise on my cheek, a souvenir from a man who saw me as a tool. Now I was living with another. The method was different, the end goal was the same. Use me. Control me.
My anger at him had been misdirected. My real anger was for myself. For letting the trauma of the kidnapping, the shock of his sacrifice, cloud the cold, hard facts. For allowing a moment of vulnerability to make me believe our dynamic had fundamentally changed.
He hadn't cheated. You can't cheat on a contract. I'd just forgotten the terms.
His words were a bucket of ice water, a shocking and necessary wake-up call. The lines weren't blurred. They were etched in stone, and I'd been the one trying to look away from them.
The promise I'd demanded from him was the most humiliating part. "I expected respect." Like a victim begging for decency from the man who'd kidnapped her. Like a wife asking for loyalty from a husband who'd never promised it. I'd shown him my hand. Let him see that I cared about what he did, and not because of business.
Never again.
No more soft moments. No more reading into things that weren't there. From now on, I'd be the perfect business partner. Polite. Distant. Untouchable. I'd play my part until the deal was done or I found a way out.
The rescue was acknowledged. The debt was noted. And now the ledger was closed.
I'd been tossing and turning for what felt like forever, sleep refusing to come no matter how much I begged for it. I reached for a book on the nightstand, hoping the pages might quiet the noise in my head, and leaned back against the headboard.
I barely made it two pages before the door opened without so much as a knock.
Alessandro walked in with that slow, measured pace of his and stopped at the foot of the bed, just watching me. His gaze was heavy, unrelenting, like he could peel back every layer I'd wrapped myself in until there was nothing left but the raw, wounded parts I was trying so hard to protect.
I lifted the book higher, deliberately burying my face in the page. If I engaged him now, it would turn into another exhausting exchange where I threw accusations and he twisted them into excuses. We were trapped in a cycle with no end, and I was so damn tired of repeating it.
